OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 20011/4/21

[Doug Lea]

[Leaving the "discuss" list CC intact for this post.]

On 05/06/11 02:39, neugens.limasoftware at gmail.com wrote:
> Perhaps not surprisingly. That may be the whole point of the self appointed board.

The current self-appointed board it trying the best it can to
complete the work of the now-defunct initial self-appointed board
(which left only the current "interim" rules and conventions).
Part of this best-effort is trying to expedite adoption of
bylaws and revised contributor agreements, as well as encouraging
creation of per-project process documents, infrastructure
improvements and so on. It is inevitable that all of these
will cause a few minor transient snags. But also inevitable that
they will result in a better OpenJDK.

>
> It's much easier if contributions are selected by some upper level manager
> rather than via a meritocratic, community based and open approach.

My belief is that Oracle did not want to delay jdk8 project creation,
so please don't blame them. However, other GB members argued that
it is against the medium/long term interest of OpenJDK to proceed
using interim rules, given that any delays are expected to be transient.
As the meeting minutes show, we arrived at a consensus compromise
that limits delay to the main bottleneck (legal review).
If "transient" turns out to be more than a matter of, say, a month,
then it can only be because there are some deeper problems. If that
is the case, the decision will surely be revisited in light of those
deeper problems.

-Doug